March 24, 2009
We get so far out front of ourselves that I often lose track of where we are. Case in point: May is at the printer and we are working on parts of June and July and September issues. Someone at Festival of the West asked me about the Alamo and I had to stop and think if that is already out, or if it's something we are working on, or something we did two years ago (the Alamo piece is at the printer).

I finished Tom Lea's "The Wonderful Country" on Sunday. Hated for it to end (always a sign of a good read). Really enjoyed the Mexico sojourn passages, like this:

"Martin Brady had breakfast by a farmhouse door at dawn, three leagues from Chihuahua. The taste of the greasy gordas the woman gave him and the stale coffee, stuck sour in his throat. His bones ached unrested, he felt dizzy from the long motion of his ride, and his eyes stung. When he had given the woman a real, he went to the well in the farmyard and from a leaky bucket dashed water on his face. Then he mounted Lagrimas and rode tired, on a tired horse, toward the city."

Lea gets the grind of a long ride really good and he has the feed and care of horses down to poetry. And by the way, Brady's horse is named Lagrimas, which means "tears", as in crying, in Spanish. Of course there's lots of Mexico in Frederic Remington and his drawings for Mickey Free:

And, by the way, the woman with Bruce Dern at Festival of the West looked quite a bit like NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon's main squeeze:

Just got off the phone with Joey Dillon and he is Josh Brolin's gun and tomahawk coach on the new Jonah Hex, which goes before the cameras on April 1. Joey tells me this one is going to be "bad ass." Joey is also in line to coach another graphic novel-headed-for-the-big-screen, Caliber.

I've been told the difference between heaven and hell can be quite minor. Case in point:

Heaven is Where:
The Police are British,
The Chefs are Italian,
The Mechanics are German,
The Lovers are French
and
It's all organized by the Swiss.

Hell is Where:
The Police are German,
The Chefs are British,
The Mechanics are French,
The Lovers are Swiss
and
It's all organized by the Italians.

That pretty much says it all, eh?

"My treasures do not chink or glitter, they gleam in the sun and neigh in the night."
—Old Vaquero Saying